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In Waste Of Paint, our writer/artist team of Jamie Peck and Debbie Allen will review goings-on about town in words and images.

This weekend we found ourselves in the rare situation that all the shows we wanted to see were in "the city": one at the Lower East Side's anachronistically good Cake Shop, the other at hulking mega-club Webster Hall. Maybe it's time to remove that "give Manhattan back to the Indians" pin from my messenger bag.

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To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. This is from the Voice's own Nick Murray, who kept things stable during Pazz & Jop .

​I turned in my Pazz & Jop ballot on December 22, and instantly regretted my decision to rank both albums and singles alphabetically instead of by order of preference. A Voice colleague chided me for this decision after we got back to the office the next week, and she was probably right. Oh well. Had I given proper attention to sequencing my ballot, I probably would have gone mad, spending the last few weeks emailing revision after revision to Needlebase guru Glenn McDonald. Wait does my ballot suggest that Mr. Collipark's unjustly unheralded Can I Have the Club Black Please? was the best rap mixtape of 2011? That can't be right. Swap in that Gunplay. Or Lil B. Or Meek Mill. And so on.

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To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. We'll start off the series with Seth Colter Walls of New York City, who has a constant itch to do the deep dive and find the single-voter albums out there. Find his ballot here.

​Damn do I ever love voting in, and then reading, Pazz and Jop. All these serious music-listening people, expressing opinions, mostly with a high degree of sincerity: admit it, it's a nice break from the social media-enabled review cycle, in which a lot of people apparently feel obliged to sound off on topics about which they may only kinda sorta have an aesthetic stake. (Read: The Internet.)

Consumers (and/or voters) often look to the number ones, to talk about the consensus where it exists—me, I liked but did not love Merrill Garbus's poll-winning record, outside of the stunning tracks "Powa" and "Bizness"; I suspect her masterpiece as a composer may yet be written for forces larger than her multi-tracked self—but in times where a 10-vote album ballot feels ever more confining and statistically unrepresentative of broader listening habits, I'm always fascinated to look at the sheer number of lonely minority reports on this side of the poll.

Critics cited 1,734 different full-lengths this year; way more than half of those titles had only a single champion. Multiple votes for albums only start to occur with real consistency around poll position #341 (Gang of Four's Content). If you're a true Pazz freak you're gonna do the deep dive, and try to find something new in that glut of passions rebuffed (or ignored) by the hivemind. As in: wow, East River Pipe put out a record this year? I didn't know that. Same-ish thing goes for Brooklyn Rider and their disc of Philip Glass string quartets.

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Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing MP3s from new and emerging local talent.

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Brooklyn black metal astral-projectors Liturgy have been the perfect blend of gut-grinding aggression and hypnotic ecstasy ever since their transcendent debut Renihilation--an album that one of the earliest YIMBY columns gushed was "euphoria through dissonance, repetition and volume; turning metal nightmares into something ready for the Dream House." Aesthethica, due May 10 on Thrill Jockey, keeps their trance-inducing roar, but counters the black metal with the jarring, head-fucky rhythms of math-rock--think Don Cab or Oxes played at hallucination-inducing speeds. Better yet, think less Branca blear, more Stravinsky stabs.

"Generation" is what frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix considers "the keystone of the whole record," a head-knocky repetition of an off-kilter riff. As best as I can figure at this breakneck speed, it's a highest-velocity trade-off of 7/8 and 10/8 riffs, with one quite satisfying extra 7/4 on every third turn-around--you know, just to keep it from being a total exercise in temple-massaging hypertension. Combine 17 and 17 with the accommodating 14 support beam, and you get an even 48--which translates back into a swinging 4/4 groove. This basic rhythmic pattern is scattered all over the rest of the record, but here, Liturgy rides it out for seven minutes as a mantra, as a meditation, as plaything, as dissonant channel into worlds beyond.

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all photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Liturgy

Last night was another installment of Test Patterns, the showcase of our pals over at Impose throw every month. This round featured drum tribe Aa, YIMBY faves Liturgy, and the solo work of Parts & Labor's Dan Friel. Apparently they're all too hungover to post anything about last night's festivities, but so these illustrative photos from our DIY-photo ninja Rebecca Smeyne should say it all. Namely, that the ingenious folks at Don Pedro hide holes in the ceiling tile with Corona posters. Goodbye.

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​Here we have the interesting prospect of spending six daylight hours tomorrow inside at Public Assembly, hearing men with beards elaborate on theories regarding black metal. An event called Hideous Gnosis, no less. Voluminously and silkily bearded SOTC affiliate Brandon Stosuy will be reading from his in-progress oral history of black metal, the research for which almost got me killed one time. Early YIMBY subject Liturgy will be there, too, in the form of frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, helming a presentation modestly described as "Transcendental Black Metal." Plus work by artists Nader Sadek, Lionel Maunz, entertainingly punny panel titles ("Black Confessions and Absu-lution"), and something called "Sym-posium (together-drinking)."

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The New Yorker Festival, the annual and upwardly-mobilely priced arts and culture series, has announced most of its 2009 line-up. The relevant, music-related graf in the press release: "Pop-music offerings will include interviews with and performances by Neko Case, Bon Iver, Steve Earle, and Loudon Wainwright III; a pub-rock reunion with Ian Hunter, of Mott the Hoople, and Graham Parker, of Graham Parker and the Rumour; and a panel discussion about the music industry with Jace Clayton, Josh Deutsch, Melvin Gibbs, Danny Goldberg, and Livia Tortella. In addition, a special Brooklyn Playlist concert at Brooklyn's Bell House, curated by Sasha Frere-Jones and Kelefa Sanneh, will feature Dirty Projectors, House of Ladosha, Jubilee, and Liturgy." Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's Liturgy--an early YIMBY subject, back in July--would be the surprise here (given that their uncompromising and harsh brand of black metal seems excessive, even for enlightened yuppies and the like), but note the two very well informed music critics who booked the show. So no surprise at all, actually.

Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing new and emerging MP3s from local talent. Recently, we've given you the Beets' "Don't Fit In My Head," the video for Motel Motel's "Coffee," and Werewolves' "Dora Gerson."

Liturgy's Hunter Hunt-Hendrix

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Liturgy are the first black metal band that truly embodies the ghosts of New York. They play metal like it's a minimalist downtown art/life/religion project in the tradition of dronemasters Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young's Dream Syndicate. Through their own brand of growling, gnarling, lightning-fast black grind, Liturgy try to find euphoria through dissonance, repetition and volume--turning metal nightmares into something ready for the Dream House. Their debut album for metal label 20 Buck Spin, Renihilation, is due in August. The first leaked track, "Ecstatic Rite" couldn't be more aptly named--four minutes and 44 seconds of churning blast that aims for the heavens and stretches out when it gets there.

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